


the spark that bled

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Kylo Ren Angst, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Runaway AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 03:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5769544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He failed his directive once when he chose to abandon the girl to a sandblasted and nameless fate, instead of giving her the clean death he’d intended. He failed again when something deep within him--a spark of light that spluttered and burned--prompted him to turn back. Pre-TFA AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the spark that bled

**Author's Note:**

> Coming out of longtime fanfic retirement because these two won't leave me alone. (Also because it's extremely gratifying giving the finger to ex-fandom hypocrites, errrr, "friends.")
> 
> I'm still feeling this one out plot-wise, but this is heavily inspired by fanart by both dc9spot and LittleChmura. Tags/ratings will evolve with later chapters.

Jakku was the same as a death sentence, he had told himself. A sun-baked graveyard in the Western Reaches with vintage Imperial monoliths, once the pride of his grandfather’s fleet, half-buried under drifts of sand. Where all manner of coarse life forms fought over the rusted scraps of starships, haggling for vacuum-sealed survival rations that predated his birth. If the elements didn’t kill you--and there was an excellent chance they would--then someone else might, in order for a chance at your daily protein slab. All he need do was turn his back and wash his hands of the situation. And he thought he had.

But his feelings, as they were wont to do, betrayed him.

 _I want to be your padawan_ , _Ben_ , the childish treble piped up in his mind, and his resolve wobbled again before he hissed a stream of curses and banished the memory, rolling over onto his back a moment before heaving himself out of the narrow bed and staggering into the refresher. His gut roiled as if he’d swallowed fire. Something barbed and caustic bounced off the walls of his stomach, pricking at his windpipe, making it hard to swallow, to breathe.

“You should have killed her,” he told his reflection in the mirror, critically eyeing the pale, spotted face that gazed back, half-hidden under shaggy black hair plastered to his forehead and neck with sweat, those overlarge ears that had earned him no shortage of teasing from the other students--that they were all dead now offered him little in the way of consolation. He hated looking at himself without the mask now. That mask inspired fear, commanded respect. The boy behind it--weak, sentimental, foolish Ben--provoked only revulsion in him. Mockery. Pity.

_She’ll die out there anyway. Alone. No one is coming to get her. No one knows she’s there but you._

Anger swelled in him again. It was Luke’s fault, all of it. He knew his uncle had been lying by omission about something in regards to the child from the moment they met. _I knew her mother from the Rebellion_ , he’d said evasively the day she’d arrived on Yavin 4, homesick and sobbing, clutching a threadbare doll dressed in miniature Rebel fatigues. _She’s got nowhere else to go now. The Force--it’s strong with her. I know you feel it, too_.

He felt it, all right. And he had felt something else, when he’d sighed with impatience and proffered his hand to the crying child. He’d only meant to lead her to the younglings’ sleeping quarters, to pawn her off on one of the older girls in the hopes they’d quiet her incessant whimpering, but the moment her small hand grasped his, a sudden shock rippled through his body and nearly knocked him off balance. The crying stopped, and that tearstained, blotchy little face had beamed up at him, like the sun breaking through the clouds.

After that she’d followed him around like a tip-yip. And he’d allowed it. That had been his most critical mistake.

“I don’t _care_ ,” he hissed at his reflection as spittle freckled the mirror. Another lie. Of course he cared. Care was the reason he hadn’t been able to strike her down. He’d come so close, and her screams were so deafening over the sparking and sputtering of his blade--but swing and a miss, and he’d sent her to the ground with a Force blast instead, leaving her there motionless in the mud amongst the other corpses. Had he not moved swiftly after that before Luke returned to find his school and pupils ablaze in a massive pyre, he’d never have been able to hide his shame and failure on Jakku.

He’d paid the blubbery Crolute junk boss well enough to keep silent, with the promise of more to come, but it hadn’t eased his mind. Nor had her screams as he departed--they’d penetrated the atmosphere, the hull of his ship, rippling through the Force as they pounded into his brain. _Come back. Come back._

He splashed water on his face, paced up and down the length of his cramped stateroom, laid back down on the bed and rolled off a moment later. The acid burn in his stomach was still there.

The Supreme Leader had been so pleased with his efforts, singling him out amongst all the others like a doting elder dandling a favored grandchild on their knee. _Mark this day, Kylo Ren. You have brought about the end of the Jedi. No more will their light pollute our civilization. Only in true darkness can one look upon the stars in all their glory_. He had held his breath and blanked his mind, and waited for the moment in which Snoke would seize upon his uncertainty and sense his failure--but the moment never came.

 _It will come. He will know you failed this test. And the next one will be harder._ The next...he pushed the thoughts out of his mind. He cared nothing for them. His father, disappearing into hyperspace on the Corellian junk bucket with the Wookiee at his side; his mother, poring over intelligence reports in some dark and crumbling Resistance bunker. It was all they had ever done; all they knew how to do. They’d sent him away in the first place; why should he care what became of them now, any more than the girl?

But the thought of her still panged at his conscience, in a way the memories of his own family did not. She was different simply because she was _like him_. And like him, she could just as easily be fashioned into a weapon, a tool to carry out a despot’s grand plans. He’d carefully plucked out her memories before he’d left her in the Crolute’s care, leaving her just as nameless and malleable as he had once been.

For a moment he entertained the thought of presenting her to Snoke, as a gift of sorts, an unsharpened dagger that gleamed with the raw power of the Force--and he convulsed suddenly at the image, surprising himself with his own disgust. So she could be groomed for his pleasure, as he had been nearly from birth? So that she could crumple under Snoke’s slithering, oily stranglehold, lying awake nights with his voice filling every crevasse of her consciousness, whispering that there was glory in her pain, triumph in suffering, joy in death?

 _Dear boy, how else do you expect to surpass the great name of Darth Vader?_ Snoke's voice reverberated through his mind, unbidden and disorienting; whether it were an echo from the future or past, or an auditory hallucination brought on by his own paranoia, he had no way of ever knowing. He never had known the difference.

He went to the toilet and vomited. When he caught sight of himself in the mirror again, dark sunken eyes floating in that too-pale face, he remembered how she had looked into that same face that he so despised and had smiled, and he knew he had no choice.

 

 

* * *

 

He didn’t wear his mask to Niima Outpost; he kept his hood pulled down over his face. She was standing at a washing table nearly as high as she was tall, scrubbing ineffectively at greasy bits of metal with a rag and smearing most of the gunk on her face as she pushed damp tendrils of hair out of her eyes. Her hair was still bound up in that row of three knobs as it had been when he’d left her, as it had always been. _This is how Mama does my hair, but I can’t do the top one,_ she’d prattled to him, holding out a cloth tie. _Can you help me, Ben?_

Crouching to child’s level, he took a deep breath and waved his hand slowly over the top of her head, letting the memories slide back into place like interlocking tiles. All but one. He tapped her on the shoulder, and, startled, she whipped around so quickly her head nearly collided with his. Tears filled her eyes at once, and she flung herself at him.

“Ben! Ben! Ben!”

He was thrown too off guard by the tiny arms thrown around his neck to hush her at first.

“Did you come to take me home? I want to go home!”

 _Home._ The word was so nebulous to him now. Once he had thought it meant the _Falcon_ ; then he had taken to using it to refer to the succession of New Republic outposts and Resistance bases to which he’d tagged along behind his mother, spending a month here, a fortnight there. Then it had been the academy, for a brief shining moment, until it had become plain that even there he was still an anomaly, a defective part in an otherwise well-oiled machine. But the word had been ever meaningless. _Your home is the First Order,_ Snoke had told him. _This notion of ‘home’ as something contained within four walls--a flimsy structure tied to flimsy people--this is the dominion of sentimental fools. You are not a fool, Kylo Ren._

“No,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “We can’t ever go home again.”


End file.
